"The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0, the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001. LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem."

"and at least those versions offered improvements over their predecessors -- today the new 'functionality' is usually stupid garbage like dicking with toolbar arrangement and skins."

Yep, often times things change for the sake of change rather than for the sake of improvement.

"Yeah... I'm digging out my Office 97 disk... just have to remember that it screws with UAC on Win7."

I happily used office 97 for a long time, nothing newer offered a compelling reason to upgrade. This was probably true for virtually all MSOffice users, but of course it always came down to compatibility problems forcing everyone to upgrade together.

Edit: As I recall, it was the last version of office which could be backed up and reinstalled by copying it's program files and wasn't dependent on an installer or the registry. Windows software maintenance was better in those days.